Events

Yesterday got up to 17°C, making it the warmest Chicago Thanksgiving since 1966. And then this happened, as predicted: It's now -1°C with 40 km/h wind gusts and a wind chill of -8°C. Even Parker looked annoyed this morning on his first walk, squinting into the wind with his ears flopping behind his head. It's amazing how little time he wastes in this kind of weather, compared with his need to sniff every square centimeter of Lincoln Park when it's nice out. (Or raining, for some reason. Must be nice...

We probably won't hit the record November 22 temperature (21°C, set in 1913), but we'll get awfully close. It's already 15°C at O'Hare, with a forecast of 18°C—followed by a cold front and 0°C by morning. Parker and I will therefore now go for a long walk.

Last night, my other sibling had a baby: That's Brendan Michael, aged one hour. Update, from the exhausted but happy dad: Brendan emerged at 2:53 PST weighing 3540 g and stretching out to 508 mm.

Well, that was fun. I've just spent the last three days organizing, upgrading, and repackaging 9,400 lines of code in umpteen objects into two separate assemblies. Plus I upgraded the assemblies to all the latest cool stuff, like Azure Storage Client 2.0 and...well, stuff. It's getting dark on the afternoon before the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday, and I'm a little fried. Goodbye, 10th Magnitude Office, until Monday.

Stuff sent to Instapaper: Chicago's John Hancock Center has sold its antennae for $70m. This makes more sense than it might seem. No, Virginia, cars are still not greener than buses. Bill McBride, aka Calculated Risk, spent time letting Joe Weisentahl interview him. McBride predicted the housing bubble in 2004. Wonder what it's like to have an autism-spectrum disorder? Rod Dreher has an example. Engineering explains how dogs smell better than we do. Programmer jokes just aren't that funny, usually....

Over the last two days I've spent almost every working minute redesigning the 10th Magnitude framework and reference application. Not new code, really, just upgrading them to the latest Azure bits and putting them into a NuGet package. That hasn't left much time for blogging. Or for Words With Friends. And I'm using a lot of Instapaper. Without Instapaper, I'd never get to read Wired editor Mat Honan drawing lessons from his epic hack last summer.

Chicago is enjoying its 14th consecutive month of above-average sunshine, along with some unseasonable warmth leading into Thanksgiving (13°C right now, 17°C on Thursday). Earlier today the NWS Climate Prediction Center released a new 90-day forecast predicting normal temperatures and precipitation in Chicago through February: This is all fine by us. Though we do hope for a mild winter...

I've spent a good bit of free time lately working on migrating Weather Now to Azure. Part of this includes rewriting its Gazetteer, or catalog of places that it uses to find weather stations for users. For this version I'm using Entity Framework 5.0, which in turn allows me to use LINQ extensively. I always try to avoid duplicating code, and I always try to write sufficient unit tests to prevent (and fix) any coding errors I make. (I also use ReSharper and Visual Studio Code Analysis to keep me honest.)...

Oh, Azure Storage team, why did you break everything? I love upgrades. I really do. So when Microsoft released the new version of the Windows Azure SDK (October 2012, v1.8) along with a full upgrade of the Storage Client (to 2.0), I found a little side project to upgrade, and went straight to the NuGet Package Manager for my prize. I should say that part of my interest came from wanting to use some of the .NET 4.5 features, including the asynchronous helper methods, HTML 5, and native support for SQL...

Texas-based Hostess Brands has shut down in preparation for liquidation: Hostess said a strike by members of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union that began last week had crippled its ability to produce and deliver products at several facilities, and it had no choice but to give up its effort to emerge intact from bankruptcy court. The Irving, Texas-based company said the liquidation would mean that most of its 18,500 employees would lose their jobs. In the...